There are a wide number of applications that can benefit from the ability to determine proximity of individuals and objects in time and space. Specifically, newspapers, local periodicals and online services offer the ability for individuals to locate other individuals that happened to be in a specific cafe, restaurant, or bus bench at a specific time. Further, newspapers, local periodicals and online services offer lost and found services that bring losers of objects into contact with finders of objects.
The concept of spacetime, also commonly referred to as space-time and space time, has been extensively applied in the fields of physics and history. For enabling human interactions, perhaps the closest use has been group calendars and online meeting and event systems that assist individuals and groups to schedule activities. Some online meeting planning systems, such as Microsoft Outlook by the Microsoft Corporation headquartered in Redmond, Wash., enable teams of individuals to schedule meetings that use resources such as meeting rooms. However, the more general concept of spacetime, allowing an individual to define subsets of space and time using a generic representation, such as that provided by GPS coordinates, has not been used to enable individuals unknown to each other to plan, schedule, coordinate and otherwise interact. A general name for a system that enables individuals to interact using a general spacetime coordinate system is referred to herein as an interpersonal spacetime interaction system, or ISIS.
With the growth of online map systems such as Google Maps provided by Google, Inc. of Mountain View, and the MapQuest mapping service provided by AOL.COM headquartered in New York, N.Y. many systems now use a GPS representation of space. For example, some geographic information systems (GIS), a term that refers to systems and applications that store and manipulate geographic information, incorporate a temporal component. That is, they allow the definition of events as portions of spacetime. Spacetime systems have been implemented in the areas of history and transportation. Historical systems have been used to create historical maps that can be interactively explored in space and time by a user. In transportation, spacetime systems are used to track the movement of delivery vehicles. Such systems are not well-suited to enable interaction between individuals.
Recently, several online services, including Loopt and Brightkite have integrated online mapping with the ability to indicate the present location of certain individuals. However, these services focus on mobile devices. Further, they focus on the present moment enabling individuals only to communicate in real-time, and are thus not well-suited to specify times and events in the past or future. Loopt is based in Mountain View, Calif. Brightkite is based in Burlingame, Calif.
One potential use for an ISIS is to enable individuals to interact or meet using personal computers, PCs, or mobile devices. PCs and mobile devices enable individuals to access websites. Further, a growing number of mobile devices are able to run applications that send and receive information across the Internet. The applications may be preloaded onto the mobile device prior to purchase. Alternatively the applications may also download the application from a server that is accessible from the Internet.
Most mobile devices are equipped with high quality display screens that can display photos. Many mobile devices can capture, store and upload photos to an online service that stores photos centrally.
One potential use for ISIS is to enable individuals that see each other in public locations to make contact. Currently, many factors contribute to preventing individuals from introducing themselves based solely on chance meetings, or physical proximity in public places. For example, one person may be engaged in a conversation with a friend and the other person doesn't want to interrupt or might be embarrassed to do so. The growth in online dating services strongly indicates that there is a market need for services that enable individuals to meet.
Many newspapers and online services enable individuals to attempt to make contact by posting messages that explain the circumstances in which they saw or were in physical proximity to another person and that provide a means for the other person to make contact. For example, the popular website Craigslist offers a “missed connections” section that enables individuals to try and make contact in this way.
In addition, ISIS can be used as the basis for an online lost and found system. Current implementations of lost-and-found services, such as lost-and-found section of craigslist.com, provided by Craigslist Inc. of San Francisco, Calif., require finders to read through a very large number of lost object postings to identify the one that comes from the owner of the lost object, and vice versa. This is because online lost and found systems do not have a fine-grained method for partitioning space. Typically they operate in large metropolitan areas. Moreover, there is no indexing of time, as postings of lost objects are simply listed in the order in which they are received. Thus, such systems have no way of automatically matching a location in space and time when an object was lost with a location in space and time when an object was found. Because such information is currently described in text there is a considerable burden on both the loser and finder of an object to provide and read sufficient information to enable an object's finder and that object's loser to discover each other. The considerable effort required on the part of both losers and finders of objects may act as a disincentive towards utilizing such a system.
Therefore, there is a need for systems and methods that enable individuals to contact one another based on the automatic detection of the proximity of events in time and space.